WARNING THIS THREAD MIGHT HAVE A BIT OF SALT
I’m a bit concerned with the recent direction the game seems to have been going. Over the last two balance changes, almost exclusively control cards have been nerfed such as:
-Altar of Souls- This card gave yellow a way to outvalue other midrange/control decks with incremental advantages each turn, which single handedly made a control deck. Sidenote, why isn’t there a tech card against structures?
-Aurora’s Dream- This card gave blue control decks a win condition to close out the game, but it was a card that you had to build your deck around in order to be good, and even when you build your deck around it, it was still slow gowing and gave your opponent plenty of time to react.
-Dream Reaver- Another card for blue control decks that closed out the game, but forced you to play blue as the only color, which limited your AOE cards.
-Windfall- This card nerf is the reason i made this topic, this card lets control deck keep up their economy to compete with midrange deck’s collecting, and rush decks economy cards. Like in the little discussion about this card nerf they stated how it was too easy to get the requirement or whatever, but then they don’t nerf a card like kahlims prayer which is pretty easy to achieve in a rush deck AND gives you card draw.
Also the recent new cards added to the game mostly push a more midrange style of decks. The only card that arguably helps control decks is voice of truth, in green which kinda surprised me, and even that is also good as a midrange card. The direction of the game seems to be like this; you play some big dude, then i play some big dude, but then you have a buff for the big dude so you can kill my big dude, now i have to play another big dude which you will kill with your buffed big dude and have tempo on me and win. Which in my opinion is the worst aspect of faeria, decks like midrange green and combat red are really linear and boring in my opinion, which is fine so that new players can learn the game, but pushing out control decks to force people into playing those types of decks in order to win seems to me short sighted,
These are mostly combo cards actually.
You can still make competitive control decks. I’ll be worried when they nerf last nightmare.
I don’t really see how any of these cards are combo cards, can you explain what you mean. i would think combo cards are cards that help you to kill of your opponent in one or two turns like ninja otk or the old lord of terror burn decks.
Windfall has basically always been at its best in combo decks. The ability to gain faeria without needing to spend resources and deck building slots on harvesters has always been its principle draw.
Dream Reaver only ever saw serious play in OTK and midrange lists. Its never been good in control and never will be. Its slow, doesn’t snowball in anyway and basically requires building lands near opponents orb in order to take advantage of its effect. Control decks really don’t want to have to build lands near opponents orb.
Dream was always an insane value card that you could build your deck around if you thought you were hard enough. With various combos in specific metas, its sometimes been strong, but it wasn’t ever a control card. It was basically just a combo finisher. You play it, and then win thanks to getting infinite value.
Altar of souls is the only control card that the faeria devs have nerfed for a long time.
While windfall may be good in combo decks as well, it was also good in the blue red bargain and blue sevens decks, which are some of my favorite decks to play, with it nerfed, the card disadvantage plus the setup of getting 10 faeria doesn’t make it worth it in those decks, and as a result i can’t seem to win with them.
Ever since dream reaver became set a god’s life to 10 i’ve used it in my blue control as a great value card that can either pressure or heal, and it gave a good reason to make a deck with tons of lake production making aurora’s trick more appealing. I don’t really know what OTK decks can use a card like Dream reaver, the most “combo” application of it is like gabrian enchantment on the following turn, but that’s not an OTK.
I think our definitions of combo deck are different from each other if you consider Aurora’s dream to be a combo card, it’s a card that gives you a huge advantage at the cost of being really expensive, i suppose you could make a combo deck with it if you made a dream deck with triple hellfire and board clears for after you dream, but that’s really optimistic at best.
Altar of souls is…oh you agreed with me, no need to argue 
Thing is, Blue sevens is a Midrange deck (though its on the more controlling end of the midrange spectrum). Windfall itself was just kind of an absurd card for blue decks in general. The windfall nerf doesn’t specially hurt control, it just hurts blue. (and really hurts combo decks that were reliant on the economy of windfall)
I’m still going to call dream reaver a midrange card. In order for it to be able to pressure, you need to build aggressive lands. And that means you really need to be going for a midrange build. Its similar to Warstorm in that regard.
I don’t count dream as a control card because it doesn’t grind in the way control decks want to do. Its more of a combo card, that people were trying to get to by chaining windfalls/stormspawns. When dream is the plan, you don’t need to bother controlling the board much or trying to grind advantage off of harvesters.
I suppose it’s mainly subjective, really i’m just salty that my favorite two decks, blue sevens and bargain control get nerfed when they didn’t seem powerful to me since i didn’t have a great winrate with them. Hopefully the devs make some more reactive cards and faeria ramp that doesn’t rely on collecting or hitting orbs, because i no longer have fun playing faeria.
